A reporter found
the evidence of our folly in the ruins of the
American consulate in Benghazi, scattered on the floor where it had
been overlooked by looters. Amid the rubble and ashes were documents left
there since the attack — clearly State Department
correspondence — including “two unsigned draft letters”
both dated Sept. 11: the missives “express strong fears about
the security situation” and dissatisfaction with the response
from higher ups. The Rosetta Stone, so to speak — the key to
understanding how and why our ambassador was murdered along with
three other Americans — turns up in a letter “written on
Sept. 11 and addressed to Mohamed Obeidi, the head of the Libyan
Ministry of Foreign Affairs office in Benghazi,” which says in
part:

“Finally,
early this morning at 0643, September 11, 2012, one of our diligent
guards made a troubling report. Near our main gate, a member of the
police force was seen in the upper level of a building across from
our compound. It is reported that this person was photographing the
inside of the U.S. special mission and furthermore that this person
was part of the police unit sent to protect the mission. The police
car stationed where this event occurred was number 322.”

Sean Smith, State
Department official (and spy), was playing
an online video game when the mob began to coalesce in front of the
consulate. He posted this harrowing message to the gaming forum a
few hours before he was killed:

“Assuming we
don’t die tonight. We saw one of our ‘police’ that guard the
compound taking pictures.”

These documents and
other official correspondence were just left there, a month and a
half after the attacks, and weeks after a visit from the FBI.
Apparently, our G-man stayed a mere three hours, due to the complete
lack of security.

“In her
response to the attacks, Hillary Clinton was clear that this had
nothing to do with the Libyan government ‘or the Libyan
people.’ How did she know that so soon after the event —
before even a preliminary investigation had been launched? Which is
to say she didn’t know, but was merely hoping.

“Yet there is
evidence of official complicity, at least at some level. When the
consulate initially came under attack, the Ambassador and key
personnel were moved to another building: when the rioters broke in,
they found the place empty. However, the Libyan “security”
team assigned to guard the compound helpfully pointed
out where the Americans were located:
presumably they did this in the process of fleeing. Whether they did
it to save their own lives, or out of sympathy for the rioters, is
an open question.”

With the discovery
that these “policemen” were photographing the inside of
the consulate, it looks like the question is closed. Clearly the
Libyan “police” actively aided the attackers, both
before and during the deadly assault. The CIA had apparently made an
agreement with the “February 17 Brigade,” a Libyan
militia, to mobilize a “rapid reaction force” in an
emergency situation, but when the emergency occurred the Brigade was
nowhere to be found — indeed, this blow-by-blow
account by retired Gen. Jack Keane indicates they
actively obstructed the rescue effort at a militia
“checkpoint.”

As for Mr. Obeidi, he
denies ever getting such a missive as is cited above, and claims he
didn’t even know the ambassador was in Benghazi, and yet the
local cops say they received a letter from the Ministry informing
them of the visit and requesting additional security — which
may have been the problem, since the “security” personnel assigned
to them were apparently in league with the attackers.

In short, Ambassador
Chris Stevens and the three others were killed with the active
complicity of the duly constituted authorities in Benghazi. Whether
the conspiracy went all the way up to the national level we don’t
yet know, but this fellow Obeidi is definitely on the suspects list.
And it doesn’t end there….

The security
arrangements for the Benghazi consulate, and indeed for all our
operations in Libya, are under scrutiny, and one detail is being
seized on: the hiring of a small and little-known outfit, Blue
Mountain Security, based in
the UK, to guard the Benghazi consulate. This
Reuters report couldn’t be more damning:

“Several of
Blue Mountain’s Libyan employees told Reuters that they had no prior
security training or experience. ‘I was never a revolutionary
or a fighter, I have never picked up a weapon during the war or
after it,’ said Abdelaziz al-Majbiri, 28, who was shot in the
legs during the September 11 assault.

“The Libyan
commander in charge of the local guards at the mission was a former
English teacher who said he heard about Blue Mountain from a
neighbor. ‘I don’t have a background in security, I’ve never
held a gun in my life,’ he said, speaking on condition of
anonymity out of fear for his safety. When hired, the commander said
he was told ‘you have great English and get along with
everyone and are punctual; we want you to be a guard commander.’

“The unarmed
guards were told to sound the alarm over the radio and then run for
cover if there was an attack, a Libyan who acted as a supervisor for
the Blue Mountain local guard team at the mission said during an
interview with Reuters. He also displayed a medal embossed with
‘Department of State’ and a horseman carrying Libyan and
U.S. flags. ‘They thanked us for our help and also gave us
this medal as an appreciation,’ he said.”

Unarmed “security”
guards — who ever heard of that? How the heck did Blue
Mountain get this contract? That’s the really interesting
part….

The Libyan government
had previously been hostile to the idea of allowing foreign security
companies to operate within their borders, but modified
the rules by granting access to those who could find
a local (presumably Libyan) partner. Blue Mountain, described by UPI
as “leading the way” for foreign mercenaries in Libya,
found such a partner: the Eclipse Group, according to several news
accounts. However, Eclipse isn’t “local,” not by
any stretch of the imagination: the Eclipse Group is Duane
Clarridge’s “private CIA,” which up until recently
had a $6 million DoD contract — withdrawn after Eclipse
embarked on a campaign to prove Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s
drug addiction. After the cut-off of Pentagon funds, Clarridge —
one of the Iran-Contra defendants, indicted and later pardoned —
found undisclosed “private donors” to run his gang of
international cowboys. His reports, regularly issued to Pentagon
insiders and journalists, have been used
to target militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan: they
have also been utilized by Fox News and others to “leak”
information embarrassing to the Obama administration. A New York
Times profile described
him thusly:

“From his
days running secret wars for the C.I.A. in Central America to his
consulting work in the 1990s on a plan to insert Special Operations
troops in Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein, Mr. Clarridge has been an
unflinching cheerleader for American intervention overseas.

“Typical of
his pugnacious style are his comments, provided in a 2008 interview
for a documentary now on YouTube, defending many of the C.I.A.’s
most notorious operations, including undermining the Chilean
president Salvador Allende, before a coup ousted him 1973.

“’Sometimes,
unfortunately, things have to be changed in a rather ugly way,’
said Mr. Clarridge, his New England accent becoming more pronounced
the angrier he became. ‘We’ll intervene whenever we
decide it’s in our national security interests to intervene.
Get used to it, world. We’re not going to put up with
nonsense.’”

A former CIA officer,
he was the brains behind the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors
during the Sandinista era and was deeply involved in recruiting for
the “contra” cause. Indicted for perjury and other
crimes during the Iran-Contra scandal, he was pardoned by George H.
W. Bush on Christmas Eve, 1992, in the midst of his trial. Aside
from collecting rumors and packaging them for the delectation of Fox
News contributors such as his former Iran-Contra buddy Oliver North,
and efforts to collect clippings from Karzai’s beard, Eclipse
appears to be doing little that can be called intelligence-gathering —
unless denouncing and otherwise undermining the CIA, which
Clarridge disdains, can be considered useful.

What is the Eclipse
Group doing in Libya? How did they pass muster with the Libyan
“government” as a “local” security company?
We don’t know, but Reuters reports:

“Blue
Mountain and Eclipse parted ways in the spring over problems with
Tripoli contracts, several sources familiar with the matter said.
The severed relationship may have prevented Blue Mountain from
getting additional work in Libya, which required the local
affiliation.”

The more one looks
into the security arrangements at the Benghazi consulate, the
murkier the picture gets: a “security firm” — not
even a year old — posting unarmed guards at a US
consulate where armed jihadists are roaming the streets, a “local”
security company which isn’t local at all and is headed up by
a “staunchly interventionist” neocon type and his
“private CIA” engaged in what the New York Times
described as “schemes that are something of a cross between a
Graham Greene novel and Mad Magazine’s ‘Spy vs. Spy’” — what is going on here?

The whole arrangement
screams setup.

Fox News has been
“investigating” the Benghazi incident, constructing a
story line in which the Obama administration supposedly left the
consulate in the lurch, and ordered a rescue team to “stand
down” when they could have been saved. Gen. Keane, in an
interview
with National Public Radio, effectively debunked that scenario and
the CIA has released a timeline. The neocons’ hope that this
would turn the election around and put the Obama administration on
the defensive has proved not to be the case, but one can’t
help wondering what role Clarridge and his Eclipse Group had in
setting the stage for this poisonous narrative.

Was the Benghazi
attack an “October surprise” intended to ambush the
Obama administration — and what part did the shadowy Eclipse
Group play in all this? In this context, Clarridge’s words
take on a rather ominous aspect:

“Sometimes,
unfortunately, things have to be changed in a rather ugly way.”

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

I would note the
curious similarity between the catalyst that supposedly set this
whole incident in motion — the Innocence of Muslims
video — and “Blue Mountain Security Solutions,” a
company that sent unarmed guards who had never held a gun in their
lives to stand watch over the US consulate in Benghazi. Both have a
curiously haphazard aspect to them, as if they were thrown together
at the last minute: in both cases, as Gertrude Stein said of the
city of Oakland, “there is no there there.” In
short, both schemes look like fronts, cut-outs, to be used and
thrown away when they no longer serve the purpose for which they
were created.

I would also note that Fox News, in constructing their
“Obama-cut-and-ran” narrative, cites anonymous “American intelligence”
sources “on the ground” in Libya: given Clarridge’s well-documented
links to Fox as a “source,” the question arises: are these
“intelligence” sources Clarridge and his dubious outfit?

Obeidi may be lying about the letter to cover his rear and conceal his utter incompetence, and also his active sympathy for militant Islam. It would be interesting to know how he got his job.

It looks like the State Department didn't care about Chris Stevens, that's why they did little for him when he requested security. The US ambassador in France has everything he wants (he is protected by US marines – yet AFAIK Paris is much less dangerous to Americans than Benghazi), but Chris Stevens, who Hillary probably didn't particularly like, got nothing. She was incompetent, and when the said that the video was the cause of the riot she was lying. Hillary pushed for war against Libya and she'd rather lie than admit that it was a major blunder.

The Blue Mountain / Eclipse Group shenanigan looks like US corruption as usual, and corruption is always at the expense of the public. The public, here, were the US diplomats in Benghazi.

Benghazi has always been an Islamist stronghold. The local authorities are pro-Islamist, like their constituents, especially since the anti-Islamist Gadhaffi has been ousted. NATO and the US (and Chris Stevens himself) waged war for militant Islam in Libya. No surprise here.

There is no US consulate in Benghazi, which is why State didn't care about security and why State tried to avoid responsibility. It was a CIA operation with about two dozen agents. (Ineffective in intelligence, of course.) Why should State provide security for CIA? Besides, the Agency likes to keep a low profile.

The US does not have an embassy, a consulate or a diplomatic mission in Benghazi. There are none listed on this State Department list of all the US embassies and consulates in the world. http://www.usembassy.gov/

There is (and was) no US consulate in Benghazi. No consul. No consular officials. No commercial officers. No diplomats of any kind. No consulate. It was a CIA operation with two dozen agents which the US has euphemistically called a "mission." Gives it a religious flavor. Chris Stevens was in this dangerous, volatile city in eastern Libya to coordinate CIA arms shipments to Turkey. His last official act in Benghazi was a dinner meeting with the Turkish ambassador.

Stevens was also probably using his past knowledge of Libyan militias — he managed them for the US from Benghazi in 2011 — to coordinate drone strikes in eastern Libya. There were several reported (by CNN) against an al Qaeda training camp in the Derna area in June.

The real story here is the Benghazi-Turkey arms & people connection and drone strikes that motivated Ambassador Stevens to be in Benghazi rather than in Tripoli where he was needed for necessary diplomatic functions.

Clarridge may have been involved in the original October Surprise that led to the election of Ronald Reagan, so it is no surprise that he might be up to the same tricks on behalf of Romney. Unfortunately the hiring of foreign contract guards for US diplomatic sites has always been a problem with contracts going to low bidders that over-hype their capabilities. The real tale here is that the US found itself in a situation where its missions would be in danger no matter what security was in place. That's what intervention in countries that we don't quite understand does for you.

Clearly someone inside the government/associated with the government is working with foxnews to get their man into the White House. As if Obama isn't hawkish enough. So much for Romney being the candidate of peace and quoting Ron Paul when it suits him.

This just shows the problem with the whole security bubble. A rush to hire people, anyone, to fill in spots, and throw tons of money at them inside the US (just think of our highly competent and honest TSA agents) and outside the US, to the point of hiring "terrorists" "bad guys" known cirminals, anyone who shows up for the job basically. Time to pop the bubble and get to work nation building at home.

behghazi behghazi behghazi..honestly who freakin cares? another question: how many times did our embassies get attacked when ghadaffi was in power? you screw around and back jihadis in an illegal coup and that's what happens. nice job cia. nice job.

i've seen more speculation and investigation about this than i ever saw about 9-11. if only all these stooges so worried about some stupid navy seal and useless 'ambassador" i.e. cia mole actually cared about 3K+ people murdered in nyc we might actually get somewhere. no, just put on a stupid yellow ribbon or american flag pin and vow to "never forget". imbeciles.

Thanks for this analysis of a remarkably confusing set of events. This complements some of the things that have been posted on Veterans Today about this attack, but without the: "trust me, my intelligence connections have confirmed this was a team out of Bahrain (I think it was), etc." drawbacks. What you have found in the public domain sheds some light on the situation.

It appears that the Benghazi Mission was a CIA front operation. Of the thirty person staff, twenty-three were CIA operatives. They were there to facilitate the transfer of Libyan weapons that were recovered from the former regime's stockpile and smuggle them through Turkey to the opposition rebels in Syria. A Libyan ship docked in a port city in Turkey that is thirty-five miles from the Syrian border just a week before the September 11 attacks in Benghazi. The ship carried 400 tons of cargo some of which was humanitarian aid and some was most likely arms. Arms that were probably desperately needed by the rebels in Aleppo where a battle royal to take the city had been underway since July.

I think Chris Stevens was a desperate man. He had probably come to the dawning realization when his numerous pleas for extra security were ignored, that he had not only been used in this operation, but was probably going to sacrificed as well. I think he was getting cold feet and that is what sealed his fate.

The attack began just an hour after Stevens had escorted this Turkish diplomat out of the front gates of the compound at the conclusion of their meeting. Why did he choose to meet with this man at the unsecured Benghazi Mission rather than at the consulate in Tripoli if it were "official" business?

It wouldn't at all surprise me if this clandestine CIA operation in Benghazi was a set up to make Obama look like even more of a failure just a couple of months before the election. This would lead one to conclude that this was organized by supporters in the Romney camp.

Face it: The whole Libya mess is our fault – like Iraq, Afghan, Viet et al.
This is what you get when a the most mediocre people in the world run it, or think they run it.
Get well, Putin, and three cheers for China – mebbe then we'll have some balance in the world.
The 'unipolar' one has been a disaster.

This a very complicated situation. It can't be solved with sound bites and one liners. Lots of speculation and wild guesses. One constant is the lie about the video. That is enough. Then figure out the rest. Yes, it is political, but what do people think we are voting about if it isn't stuff like this?

I don't understand the attack against Fox. (Well, I do understand it.) Can anyone be intellectually honest enough to admit that Fox is actually investigating this event? I have a daughter at an embassy, and I'm very concerned; is that so far-fetched?

Justin – I appreciate your efforts but to me this Benghazi dissection is like a forensic investigation as to why a bungee jumper died. Was the cord too stretchy; was it too long; or was the knot defective? Similiarly was it the movie; was it Al Qaeda; or did Obama drop the ball?
Both investigative efforts are beside the point. The bungee jumper died because the fool jumped off of a cliff – the Ambassador died because we were involved in monkeying where we had no business being.

Stevens entered Libya illegally in April 2011 in a freighter stuffed full of weapons and CIA spooks at a time when the US was murdering Libyans via cruise missiles for months and His Boss Hillary Clinton was cackling and applauding.

Why would he need to be in Benghazi for this? Easier pick up a phone from any air-conditioned DC office and simply order transport of a container of Good Stuff from some US arms factory to Turkey by chartered plane. Send the bill to some TLA, thank you very much. Turkey is in NATO, you would get all the official seals and branding in no time.

CIA getting involved in an election wouldn't be the first time. I'm old enough to remember the Iranian October Surprise where it was alleged the CIA was undermining the Carter Admin efforts to get the hostages released to help elect Reagan and one of their own, former CIA head Daddy Bush. Many reports from the time that you could find all over Langley Reagan/Bush poster with the Reagan half torn off.

The CIA already thinks and has shown that they think its perfectly fine to mess with the elections of other countries, and has since its founding. Its not a far leap from that to interfering with American elections. And there was a fair bit of evidence from 1980 that its already happened at least once.

On the other hand, this doesn't sound like a big enough "make look bad" to be worth the effort. It doesn't make Obama look good, but on the other hand no one really expects him to be supervising security details at every consulate, embassy and diplomatic mission in the world. So, the blame was always going to fall elsewhere.

More likely, they just got cocky and didn't pay enough attention to security. They hadn't been attacked, the war in Libya is winding down, and it probably felt safer there now than it had a few months ago. In that environment, people in Tripoli and people in Europe and DC didn't respond forcefully enough to a local branch office saying "Hey, we got a problem".

The US gov keeps a website of all "U.S. EMBASSIES, CONSULATES, AND DIPLOMATIC MISSIONS". Its at http://www.usembassy.gov/. This is of course useful because if you need to go to a consulate or embassy, it helps to be able to look up where it is.

Benghazi is not on this webpage. Tripoli is the only listing for Libya.

Got this from another commented here the other day, who also pointed out that when SOS Hillary talks about it officially, she used terms like "Diplomatic post","office", etc.

Tried looking on the wayback machine at archive.org to see if Benghazi was ever listed, but the page no longer seems to update and the latest archive there was from summer 2011. So its not possible there to look and see what the page looked like in say Aug, 2012. But, I'd bet it wasn't listed then. Everyone's calling this a "consulate", but it doesn't sound like the sort of place where someone could just show up and apply for a visa to the US.

[…] from pardoned war-criminal, Iran-Contra retread, and Eclipse Group director Duane Clarridge, please read Justin Raimondo’s column on Antiwar.com. Time and again, it seems that any and all shadowy operations around the world must […]

Fox is simply providing the usual narrative to convince the public of Obama's failure to act in time to save the staff at the Benghazi compound. Their whole "investigation" is designed to show Obama's weakness and inability when events were unfolding in Benghazi. More than likely, the Obama administration had little knowledge of the events leading up to what went down before or during the night of Sept 11th. it was most likely a set up organized by supporters in the Romney camp. The Fox "investigation" leaves more questions than answers,

Chris Stevens spent most of his adult life in Middle eastern countries such as Jerusalem, Riyadh, Morocco, Damascus and several years of "service" in Libya prior to the revolution. Stevens was well acquainted with the situation on the ground in Libya and was a useful asset before, during and after the revolution, He spoke the language and had an intimate knowledge of the political atmosphere in the region. I would also go so far as to suggest that Steven's usefulness in helping to usher in the Libyan revolution as far back as 2008, helped to earn him his appointment as Ambassador to Libya – a post which he occupied for little over three months before being murdered.

With his intimate knowledge of both the language and the culture of the Maghreb nations of North Africa, he was a useful asset for the US Intelligence community at a very critical time. In the last days and months of his service, I think the ambitious ambassador realized that he had signed on with folks that will kill you with no compunction when you have out-lived your usefulness.

I think you should give your daughter a crash-course in"diplomacy" and a background in the history of CIA Black Ops in today's terms. Make sure she is serving these folks with her eyes wide open. They will remove you if you become a liability, which I think was the plan for Chris Stevens all along. He was ambitious and willing to play ball with the usual suspects until he got cold feet and realized his sell-by date had long since passed and he was about to become the latest political patsy.

Fox is simply doing what it was created to do: taking information and packaging it in such a way as to help the Rs, either by making the Rs sound better or the Ds to sound worse. So while this situation may or may not be a setup, it doesn't matter to Fox since they would display the events in a helpful manner to Romney either way. There's a lot of spin you can attach to a story even without changing the basic facts – by highlighting some facts over others, implying certain motives to people involved, and so forth.

Have you scanned the internet on Benghazi? Have you read the comments? Fox & the right wing have made this out to be bigger than 9/11 the original. And Romney couldn't get to a podium fast enough after it happened. Did you see his sneer after his "press conference"?

Lie about the video? The video was translated into arabic, sent out just prior to 9/11 anniversary to arab media & the supposed film maker said he knew it cause riots & death. The film was backed by about 100 Israeli donors according to him. Look it up. If you can find the info anymore.

I've been saying this all along. Those videos were part of the coordinated effort to pull off "Benghazi-gate". Read more about them. My Arab tenant here says that the Arab world are still really angry over them. They say Allah sent Sandy to punish us. The first thing Fox & others did was to immediately discredit the video "The Innocence of Muslims". Shadow group of financial backers, the film maker has a murky past. There is a connection. Find it.

I've been saying this all along. Those videos were part of the coordinated effort to pull off "Benghazi-gate". Read more about them. My Arab tenant here says that the Arab world are still really angry over them. They say Allah sent Sandy to punish us. The first thing Fox & others did was to immediately discredit the video "The Innocence of Muslims". Shadow group of financial backers, the film maker has a murky past. There is a connection. Find it.

[…] set-up Benghazi to try to foil Obama’s re-election, and sure enough, I should’ve known Justin Raimondo would be the one to come through. The thing I don’t understand though is that everyone knows […]

So, Romney meets with Glen Doherty, and several other ex-seals (now known CIA agents), in Romney's La Jolla neighborhood, at a "mistaken" house party, just before Romney starts his preordained primary campaign. He then speaks at a house party fundraiser in Florida in May 2012, praising how the 1970s hostage crisis helped get Reagan into office, and out loud soliciting those who might be able to pull off such a stunt (see tape). Next, we learn that "private CIA" groups "Eclipse" and "Blue Mountain" are somehow entangled with the real CIA in Benghazi. Next we learn that Doherty and another CIA agent (Tyrone Woods) are killed with a mortar round. Both dead CIA agents normally lived very close to the location in La Jolla where Mitt Romney and Doherty (and several other ex seals/ Current CIA) met. The second CIA agent (Woods) was killed with Doherty just minutes after he arrived at the CIA Annex from the Benghazi airport where he was held with other CIA agents for four hours. One might ask if Eclipse penetrated the real CIA through these guys to set up another hostage crisis 60 days before the election. One might assume the planned hostage taking went wrong, and Doherty might have been (and later Woods) determined by the CIA to be the "rats" referred to in the state department's chronology, which came out long before the CIA chronology. Was the on point mortar round friendly fire from the part of the CIA that was not infiltrated? The CIA is now being investigated by the FBI, and I am not certain how willing or able that branch of the FBI is to penetrate all this clandestine material. It would take someone who knew the whole plan to spill the beans. It is interesting that Mitt was only allowed to give one interview (a silly one to ESPN) during the last 4 weeks of the campaign.

[…] again, and then we’re going to work to bring whoever did this to us to justice.”Based on information obtained by AntiWar.com, local police were seen taking pictures inside the embassy, a small British security firm was hired […]

I wonder if the latest from broadwell regarding the alleged hostages in the annex, was really another red herring to confuse investigators about the possible prior failed plan of Clarridge and his moles to take Stevens hostage during the attack to mimic the iranian hostage crisis to effect the election as it did for Reagan. In other words, there may be some findings by the FBI about hostages, but whether they were past or future, american or libyan, may be difficult to nail down.

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].